Hi
I read the proposed flyer and re-read the FAQ and Myth Busting pages.
They are all pretty good but we could use some more concise definitions,
specially if we are talking about a flyer about the semantic web in general,
not a particular conference.
How do we say in one short sentence what the semantic web is all about? How
do we turn this into a catch phrase? I will return to the very basics here.
- The semantic web is about giving all things a URI and making statements
about these things. In this way, all things are potentially combinable
with all other things, regardless of provenance and almost regardless of
"database schema" utilized.
[I say schema and not ontology because this is a familiar term to the IT
audience.]
SOA gave us "canned" services for transactions and predefined queries. The
semantic web potentially gives us a way to ask ad hoc questions and to
represent their answers in a universally understood and navigable format.
The semantic web is a
shared representation for information that can come from any variety of
sources. In this sense it decouples the information from its storage format
and source, a little like SOA decouples the invocation of the service from
its implementation.
[We note that the same claim was made of relational databases when they were
new.]
Now how do we say these things better? The key concepts are "combining",
"ad hoc," "heterogenous." Can we cook up a catch phrase around these?
"Web of data" is pretty good as a moniker.
"web of relations" [as opposed to web of documents]
"web of facts"
Using "web"capatilizes on www and contains the idea of multiple authorship
and decentralization.
I will have to think more about this.
We also talked about use cases. Coining catch phrases is easier when the
context is better defined.
For things like the Interlinking community project, the task is a lot
easier. There are all kinds of self-explaining queries that can be
showcased against dbpedia, for example.
We might also want a use case from the press world. There were a few talks
at the last ISWC about RDF in the newsroom. This is relevant for any
information worker, pretty much regardless of industry.
As for the FAQ, I will think further about contrasting RDF with relational
databases. Some more things could be said about this and the possibilities
inherent in this.
Orri